


Tempus Fugit

by Franzbibliothek



Series: Baby Xavier [1]
Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Chess, M/M, older Erik, post-Astonishing X-Men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-07 05:39:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18614257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Franzbibliothek/pseuds/Franzbibliothek
Summary: “Hello, Charles,” Erik finally said, as if he found nothing odd in Charles being outside his door, on his own two feet, looking a little over thirty, and, despite the entire universe's best efforts, not dead.Charles decides to take a break from his busy schedule to visit an old friend.





	Tempus Fugit

**Author's Note:**

> comicverse, but all you really need to know is that Cyclops killed Charles Xavier (in his defense he was kind of possessed at the time) Cyclops died later for unrelated reasons. Charles has since recently come back in a 30-something body and he's keeping his resurrection on the down low from everyone.

This was a bad idea. Charles Xavier was a man who in a past life had battled without fear or hesitation countless foes: maniacal mutants, intergalactic tyrants, and plain, unalterable human bigotry. But now, he stood paralyzed with uncertainty before a battered apartment door.

Time had not been kind to it. The surface was nicked and the varnish rubbed away in uneven patches along the edges. A large crack split the wood in the upper right corner, branching web-like towards the door’s center. It would probably have to be replaced sooner rather than later.

Charles raised a fist to knock, but paused halfway and lowered it.

A young woman entering her apartment down the hall sent him a strange look. It didn't take telepathy to know that she was wondering if he was some kind of solicitor. If Charles didn't knock now, in all likelihood he would be told off for loitering. Now that was something that would have never happened to distinguished Professor Charles F. Xavier.

One more reminder that that wasn't quite who he was anymore.

He raised his fist again, but before it could make contact the door swung open, revealing Erik, bareheaded, wearing both a scowl and a very soft looking sweater.

There was also an array of knives hovering along the doorframe, all aimed directly at where Charles stood.

“Hello, Charles,” Erik finally said, as if he found nothing odd in Charles being outside his door, on his own two feet, looking a little over thirty, and, despite the entire universe's best efforts, not dead.

“You don't seem terribly surprised,” Charles said at last, resisting the urge to rock up onto his toes. Even with Charles standing, Erik still towered, tall and unyielding, over him.

"Exactly how many times have you faked your own death?" Erik asked, the knives remained fixed where they were.

It seemed that Erik remained as blunt as ever.

"First, you'll have to tell me how many times we thought you were dead, Erik," Charles drawled, aware that this wasn't exactly the sort of conversation one has at the door, but he never could stop himself from rising to the bait when Erik was the one dangling it.

"But I never planned for it, my survival has always been a cosmic joke. You, on the other hand, probably have a color dedicated to your deaths and resurrections in your pocket calendar."

Charles resisted snorting at this, as if anyone really used pocket calendars anymore.

"It's not as if whether we intend to die or not changes anything. I would have thought you, of all people, knew that intention means nothing compared to action,” Charles said.

Some of the knives shifted out of formation to avoid Erik as he sagged slightly against the door frame. Charles worried whether his hip was still bothering him.

"But I always thought, old friend, that to you intention meant everything," Erik said, softly.

A thousand arguments from a lifetime ago echoed mockingly in the chasm of what neither of them knew how to say.

Erik straightened up, waving a hand that sent the knives flitting out of sight, before he turned around, and walked back into his apartment. Charles watched, bereft and surprised in a way he so rarely was anymore. But wasn't this what Erik had always been to him? An irreducibly complex problem for Charles to throw himself at again and again, like Sisyphus and his boulder.

It was still a shock that Erik hadn't been Charles's undoing in the end, not that both of them hadn't desperately tried to make it so. Instead, it had been a problem that he had simply refused to see until it was far too late.

Oh god, Scott.

"Are you coming in?" Erik asked, not bothering to look over his shoulder.

The question drew Charles from his thoughts and he couldn't help but let genuine gratefulness bleed into his thanks as he followed after Erik. Frankly, Charles was more than a little sick of being in his own head.

When Charles stepped over the threshold the door immediately shut behind him, securing itself with a metallic click and the scrape of a deadbolt.

Charles grinned. Erik always had a talent for gestures that coming from anyone else would be taken as a threat, but coming from him had only ever turned Charles helplessly on.

“Do you want something to drink?” Erik called out, strangely hospitable as he strode over to the slightly grubby kitchenette and began rummaging through cupboards without waiting for Charles's answer.

Charles took the chance to take in the rest of the apartment which was, well, modest if one was being polite.

The kitchenette was adjacent to a living area dominated primarily by a floral monstrosity of a couch, a low table that squatted in front of it, one leg clearly shorter than the others, and in the corner, a sagging bookcase that could barely hold various gewgaws off the ground. Then there were two closed doors, probably the bathroom and bedroom respectively. It all smelt vaguely of cabbage.

Really, the only novel thing about the place was how pleased Charles was to be there.

Charles settled on one end of the sofa, studiously ignoring the dubious stain on the central cushion that probably wasn’t blood.

“I have some brandy here,” Erik said, and Charles turned his head to watch Erik pull out a bottle and squint at the label. That reminded Charles that Erik needed reading glasses now, and he was nearly undone then and there with want.

“It’s hardly what you were drinking in Westchester,” Erik said, taking out two glasses from another cabinet and began to pour.

Charles swallowed and recovered enough to say, “I’ll take anything that isn’t actual mouthwash. Would you believe me if I told you it has been a very trying week?”

“Would you believe me if I told you it has been a very trying four years?” Erik said, approaching, handing one of the glasses to Charles’s waiting hand before he took his own seat on the opposite end of the couch.

Erik took a contemplative sip from his glass. “A week though… London was you, then?”

Charles only arched his eyebrows in affirmation.

“I should have guessed, the newscasters were very vague about where all the damage had come from.” Erik placed his glass down on the table. “It had your signature all over it.”

“They’re better off not remembering,” Charles said, rubbing his temple as if he could scrub away the oily filth of the Shadow King riffling through his mind as easily as Erik had riffled through his kitchen cabinets. He took a large swallow of the brandy, enjoying the physical sensation of burning as the alcohol made its way down his throat.

“Care to play a game?” Erik asked, standing up, striding over to his bookcase, grabbing something off a shelf. He turned back towards Charles, lifting a hand to reveal a travel chess set, the plastic sort that folded in half to keep all the pieces inside.

“Ah, I suppose one game couldn't hurt,” Charles said, an unexamined dread coiling in his stomach.

The pieces rattled against each other already battle-eager as Erik brought the board back to the table, and began to set it up. His fingers moved with economical grace as he put everything in its proper place: pawn, knight, rook, bishop, and queen. Erik finished, placing the white king neatly on its square before raising his eyes to meet Charles’s.

There was an undeniable anticipation in the way his body leaned forward as he said, “Your move.”

Charles could only think of the Shadow King’s leering smile.

He knocked back the rest of his brandy with another gulp. This was a bad idea. He knew this was a bad idea with the same bone-deep certainty that he knew that, at the end of all things, Erik really did mean well.

Charles put his glass firmly down on the table. There were no coasters. Charles did not care.

“Actually, Erik, forgive me, but I think I’m a little tired of playing games,” Charles said.

For the briefest moment Erik's mouth bowed into something that would have been a pout on a less formidable man, before Charles navigated the space between them and brought Erik down into a kiss.

What began as just a meeting of lips progressed in exponential fashion to open mouths and grasping hands tugging ineffectively at buttons and clasps. Neither one of them were willing to pull away long enough to actually accomplish anything.

It wasn't until Erik tried to push Charles down onto the cushions that Charles pulled back enough to say, “If you think I'm letting you do anything on this couch, you're terribly mistaken.”

Erik made a sour face, but in tacit agreement they stumbled to their feet together, and Charles was heady on this fact alone: both of them agreeing to a course of action with no speeches and no battles.

They remained wrapped up in each other: arms, lips, and minds as Erik gracelessly lead them towards a closed door that hopefully contained an actual bed. Erik's thoughts were a bullet train careening down a one-way track. Charles allowed himself to bask in that glorious, single-minded focus that was every bit as arousing as the hot touches and half-coherent whispers that passed between them.

Erik pulled an arm away from where it had been wrapped around Charles's waist, motioning at the door which sprang open over-eagerly, banging against the wall. It might leave a dent, Charles worried for a moment before Erik, who must have grown impatient by their pace of progress, lifted him off his feet and brought him into the bedroom.

“That could have hurt your back,” Charles scolded.

Erik dropped him on to the bed.

“Do you ever stop talking?” Erik asked, boxing Charles in with his arms and bringing their lips together once again.

“It's been known to happen,” Charles said, breathless, but unwilling to not get the last word in.

Erik nipped his ear and used their new position to try to get them both out of their clothes, but even the pinnacle of mutant might could only do so much against a zipper catching on fabric. He made a loud, frustrated sound and with another display of power he mangled Charles's zipper, pulling his trousers off at last in an awkward but effective maneuver.

Charles laughed into Erik's mouth before he pushed up Erik's sweater, as soft to the touch as it had looked, over his head and onto the floor. Charles's own shirt soon followed, though Erik was remarkably less kind to it. At least one of the buttons displaced in the scramble and the wrinkling alone would probably make it difficult to salvage after...

"Am I boring you, Charles?" Erik asked, his hand pressed against Charles’s groin, only thin fabric separating skin from skin.

Erik leaned in, his breath hot against Charles's ear. "You're thinking very loud.”

Charles startled, his mouth opened but nothing came out. Erik smirked, every inch the triumphant conqueror he had occasionally fashioned himself as.

Charles was far too old to be caught blushing, and, for that matter, far too old to be projecting like an adolescent just come into his powers. Though there was something fair, almost, in the idea of Erik for once being the one to know exactly what Charles was thinking.

Charles wrapped an arm around Erik's shoulders, drawing him closer so that Charles could press kisses to his throat as he radiated desire, gratefulness, and an emotion that was an impossible mash of frustration-admiration-heartbreak that only Erik had ever pulled from him. Erik made a hitched sound in the back of his throat, his cock hard where it pressed against Charles's stomach.

Charles mouthed at Erik's shoulders next, tasting salt and sweat as his hands wandered in a slick slide down Erik's back to his rear-end which was far firmer than it really had any right to be and Charles really couldn't be blamed for giving it a light slap. Erik jolted, and sent Charles a withering look, his cock now pressed against the groove where thigh meets hip.

"Wasn't that a little childish?" Erik asked.

Charles sent him back a beatific smile. "You can't blame me, you always were the silver fox between the two of us," Charles said, but gave Erik’s rear a slightly apologetic pat nonetheless.

Erik shook his head, muttering, "dirty old man," and took the opportunity to drag down Charles underwear, the last barrier between the two of them.

Charles must have truly been distracted earlier because he hadn't noticed the little bottle of lubricant that Erik had grabbed from somewhere until he had both of their cocks in hand. It was good. It was hot and slick and so, so good. Charles closed his eyes, grasping desperately at some semblance of self control. It had been such a long time.

Erik said he had been gone for four years, but it had seemed centuries longer and even before he had 'died’ when was the last time that anything had felt uncomplicatedly good? Working with Erik to save Genosha? The last holiday fishing trip before Cassandra Nova? Jean and Scott's wedding?

Jean was right to blame him for what happened with Scott, how hadn't he seen what was happening? Scott had been his son for god's sake—

"Stop thinking," Erik said and Charles was brought back to the plane of physical reality and more importantly Erik's bed, the sheets rumpled beneath his back.

"Stop talking, stop thinking. I never know what you want from me," Charles said, pushing sweaty strands of hair back from Erik's forehead.

Erik leaned in and huffed a sigh into Charles's neck. "You're the mind-reader, I thought it was obvious." His hand was still around both their cocks. Charles kissed Erik then, if only so he didn't have to look into Erik's eyes and know that he knew what Charles had been thinking about.

Erik started moving his hand, finding a rhythm once more, and this time Charles kept his mind present, reveling in the physical and the real. The heat of Erik's skin, the rapidity of his breath, the soft noise he made in his throat whenever Charles's wandering hands found a sensitive spot.

Erik's hand though remained steady and unalterable, wonderful until it became maddening and Charles needed more. Only no canting of his hips or fingernails digging into his shoulders could entice Erik to speed up. If anything he slowed down, the complete and utter bastard! Until all at once it felt as if he was going too fast and too tight.

Charles's limbs stiffened, his mind stuttered as he came.

He stared down in disbelief at the lurid picture they made. His stomach a mess and Erik still holding both them in his hand, looking as surprised by this turn of events as Charles was.

"So, it really is a younger body and not some illusion," Erik said, wryly.

Charles frowned and pushed lightly against Erik's shoulder. Erik let go of his grip on the both of them and allowed himself to be rolled onto his back. Charles clamored on top of him, and reached a hand down between them, taking Erik's still hard cock in hand.

A lifetime of making the best of the increasingly terrible circumstances meant that Charles wasn't going to waste any time on regret over something not going as planned. Not when there was work to be done and problems to be solved. Erik thrust his hips up involuntarily while swearing in three different languages.

“Was that last one Atlantean?” Charles asked.

“Keep going, you bastard,” Erik growled.

Charles laughed but he wasn't a tease and gave Erik the exact speed and pressure that he asked for in between gasps and moans.

Charles was suddenly glad for his premature finish. No longer caught up in his own fog of arousal, Charles could better appreciate the high flush on Erik's cheeks, the steady beat of his heart against Charles's unoccupied hand, his thoughts a runaway train barreling towards a cliff with no possible chance of stopping before it went over in complete and utter ruin.

Erik made a soft sound in the back of his throat and came. Charles worked him through it and for a moment Charles didn't need to think about the lives he had failed to save or the lives he had ruined.

Afterwards, Charles lay there inert, cuddling against Erik as if he were a particularly large hot water bottle that also just happened to have a warrant out for its arrest in over fifty countries around the world. Maybe more by now, Charles had been gone for a while.

Charles stroked a gentle hand down Erik's flank.

Erik limp and radiating pleasure, pressed his hand against the back of Charles's neck, disturbing the stubble there in a way that was novel and maybe even a little ticklish. Charles closed his eyes and felt like he was being submerged in a tub of warm water after trudging through snow for a hundred years.

"We need to clean up," Erik said.

"Magneto, the marvelous master of magnetism cleans up after himself? Don't you have underlings for that?" Charles asked, having no intention of ever moving again. He'd have to get Erik to invest in nicer sheets.

"The magnificent master of magnetism," Erik grumbled, but he didn't push Charles away as Charles had half expected him to. Instead Erik simply lifted up his hand and made a lazy gesture in the direction of the door.

Unable to curb his curiosity, Charles craned his neck enough to watch as a metal bowl floated past the doorway and out of sight once more. He heard a light clink of metal against metal and then the tinkling rhythm of running water for a minute before it stopped. The bowl hovered once more into view, entering the bedroom, and landed with neat precision on the bed's side table.

"So, it really isn't all switching the polarity of the earth, is it?" Charles asked, charmed by the display that was somehow all the more incredible in its modesty.

Erik only gave Charles an arched look as he finally extricated himself and deigned to sit up, reaching blindly for something on the floor. He brought back Charles's shirt and began wetting the material.

"That's a nice shirt," Charles said, mostly to be contrary, too far gone in his post-orgasmic haze to come up with a more coherent topic to bicker over.

Erik ignored him and wiped them both down with a few perfunctory swipes before tossing the shirt back to the floor. He stretched out on his side of the bed, eyes closed, not quite asleep yet, but on his way.

Charles was left on his back, naked and a little cold now, his skin slightly damp after Erik's ministrations, but he ignored the sensation in favor of folding his hands over his stomach and staring up at the ceiling.

All of Charles’s significant mental energies were preoccupied with trying not to think, to just allow himself to indulge in a job well-done: Proteus, the Shadow King, and Lucifer all neatly taken care of like so many tick marks on a to-do list. Charles didn't want to think about the warehouse of bodies he had left behind. How the worst part of it was that their deaths had seemed... acceptable, sacrifices for the greater good.

Like Scott. Fuck.

"Charles?" Erik asked, his hand found again the tender space at the back of Charles's neck. It wasn't fair for him to be so gentle now, decades after it was too late.

Charles closed his eyes. "I'm wondering if I should erase your memories of this," Charles admitted.

Erik didn't startle or panic, though he did withdraw his hand. Charles opened his eyes and turned on his side, idly tracing loose figures against the pillowcase. The pillows were flat; Charles would have to convince Erik to get nicer pillows too.

"It's not personal... of all the people who helped bring me back only Psylocke remembers me. So if the Shadow King still has hooks in me, she can put me down like a mad dog. I even met with my original X-men— barring Scott, of course, but it wasn't exactly a warm reunion. I think I did them a favor making them forget," Charles said in a torrent, a flood of honesty over taking the dam of Charles's better judgement.

Erik blinked at him slowly with his solemn eyes. "So, Scott wasn't where wherever you were?" he asked.

A silence fell between them.

"I hope not.” Charles's hand clenched, fingernails digging into new, unblemished skin. “I truly hope not. I already ruined his life. I don't want to be responsible for ruining his death too,” Charles said, genuinely appalled in a way that he had thought that the Shadow King's games burned out of him long ago.

An involuntary shiver pass through Charles. He was still cold, he realized, and then he was distracted trying to remember when the last time he had actually felt cold had been.

Erik sat up enough to grab at a blanket that had been kicked to the end of the bed and spread it out over the both of them. Charles couldn't help noticing that it was as terribly cheap as everything else in Erik's little bolthole, but it was also soft and warm and smelled like Erik.

"Go to sleep, Charles. You can decide whether you're going to mind wipe me or not in the morning," Erik said, gruffly as he waved a hand and the room went dark.

Show-off, Charles thought, and he tried to think of a sufficiently cutting rejoinder to Erik treating him like a fretting child, but he fell asleep before he could think of one.

* * *

Charles awoke to the sensation of something pressing against the skin above his right eye. For a moment, Charles wondered if this was the start of some new torture devised by the Shadow King. Only, it wasn't a painful feeling, just a strange one.

Charles opened his eyes to see Erik leaning over him, delightfully unshaven, and running a finger along Charles's eyebrow.

"What are you doing?" Charles asked, not moving, but Erik drew his hand back anyway. He didn't look embarrassed at being caught.

"Your eyebrows, they're the same. I thought you took this body from someone else?" Erik asked.

Charles scowled, self-conscious suddenly of how his eyebrows drew together.

"Why does everybody assume that I'm some kind of body-snatcher?” Charles exclaimed, sitting up. “I know I've been involved in my share of unsavory activities, but I'm not Proteus, I'm not Cassandra Nova, and I'm not the Shadow King.”

"I never noticed before, they look a little like Spock's," Erik said, with a thoughtful expression as if that was in anyway a reasonable response to Charles's outburst.

Then again, Erik also thought that red and magenta went well together. Really, Charles had no one to blame but himself, Erik had never hidden who he was.

"Isn't Star Trek a little after your time?" Charles asked, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, standing up into a stretch. Sunlight was beginning to claw its way around the edges of the window blinds and Charles had time tables to keep. "And I would have thought that it was a little too utopian for your tastes."

"You're forgetting that I've been living with a group of teenagers for the past year. If they're not saving the world from your evil step-brother then they're on the couch watching re-runs of shows from the sixties excited for new episodes," Erik said, sounding long-suffering.

Charles began to gather his scattered clothing from the floor and tried not to sigh too heavily over his ruined shirt. "Please tell me that they've been doing some of their homework," Charles said, examining with some despair whether any of the buttons were intact.

"I'm not their father, Charles," Erik said, and Charles had to remind himself that he had made a very deliberate decision to have nothing to do with time-displaced X-men because the last thing they needed were more time paradoxes. Still, it was hard to suppress a feeling of dismay at the thought of his previous students becoming very adept at punching, witty one-liners, and nothing else.

"I did tell them to read Kafka once," Erik offered.

"Oh, good. If there is one thing that will serve them well in this world it is existential despair," Charles said, while being distressingly certain that his underwear must have been kicked under the bed and there was simply no way he was getting down on the floor to dig around for it. He'd have to acquisition new underwear once he left. Acquisition. Ha. What dressed-up words he used for steal now, it was like he was back in the war.

Charles realized belatedly that Erik hadn't immediately engaged them in a furious debate on the virtues of Kafka. He glanced over at the bed, and saw that Erik was watching him intently.

"I wonder if this is going to be your new strategy," Erik mused.

"What?" Charles asked as he finished buckling his belt.

Erik rolled on his side, sheets pooling distractingly about his waist, leaving little to Charles very active and vivid imagination. Time tables, Charles reminded himself sharply.

"Are you going to try to seduce me to join whatever plan I know you must be hatching in that over-sized brain of yours?" Erik asked, not angry or accusatory, just curious.

"I suppose that depends on whether it would work?" Charles said, smirking as he snagged Erik's abandoned sweater from the floor.

Erik frowned a little and fell back against the bed, his expression remote. It made Charles desperately want to slip inside that beautiful dangerous mind of his and just live there always.

Time tables, Charles reminded himself again, but he couldn't stop himself from advancing towards the bed, placing a hand on Erik's cheek so that they their eyes had no choice but to meet.

"I wasn't lying when I said I was tired of playing games, Erik," Charles said, leaning forward until there was only a breath of distance between their mouths. "There are things I want, and this time around, I intend to get them." Charles's lips brushed against Erik's as he spoke.

"And am I one of these things, old friend?" Erik asked.

Charles closed the final distance between them, pressing his mouth firmly against Erik's, his hands still cupping Erik's face. Erik's hand went to Charles's hip, apparently by instinct. Time tables, time tables, time tables.

Charles pulled back and they stared at each other in silence as the sunlight continued to creep insatiably around the window blinds.

"You're many things, Erik," Charles said, and settled for pressing a kiss to Erik's right eyebrow before moving from the bed.

He pulled Erik's sweater over his head and was as close to fully dressed as could be managed. Charles allowed himself one last glance back, but Erik was staring up at the ceiling, apparently lost in his own thoughts.

Charles approached the bedroom door, trying not to feel a disappointment that he didn't dare examine too closely.

"Do you still believe it? Your dream?" Erik asked. Charles didn't turn. "That we can all co-exist, forgive, even after all of this?"

Charles stood in the bedroom doorway, taking in the cramped, shabby apartment, committing every detail of it to memory.

"I believe… there is much to be done," Charles said at last, before closing the bedroom door behind him.

He headed towards the front door, but couldn't resist pausing at the chessboard, still sitting on the table in expectation. Charles plucked the white knight three spaces up and two spaces over.

He continued on, coming to the front door which unlocked itself just as Charles's hand touched the handle. Charles smiled as he pulled it open and stepped out into the hall.

He paused and turned to trace the crack that split down to the center of the door. Perhaps there would be time enough this round, Charles thought, hoped, dreamed. Time enough for love as well as hate. Charles pulled his hand away and tucked it into his pocket, continuing to make his way down the hall, leaving the door behind him still ajar.


End file.
